NVIDIA Releases 364.96 Hotfix Driver

The GeForce 364.xx line of graphics drivers hasn't been smooth for NVIDIA. Granted, they tried to merge Vulkan support into their main branch at the same time as several new games, including DirectX 12 ones, launched. It was probably a very difficult period for NVIDIA, but WHQL-certified drivers should be better than this.

Regardless, they're trying, and today they released GeForce Hot Fix Driver 364.96. Some of the early reactions mock NVIDIA for adding “Support for DOOM Open Beta” as the only listed feature of a “hotfix” driver, but I don't see it. It's entirely possible that the current drivers have a known issue with DOOM Open Beta and, thus, they require a hotfix. It's not necessarily “just a profile,” and “profiles” isn't exactly what a hardware vendor does to support a new title.

But anyway, Manuel Guzman, one of the faces for NVIDIA Customer Care, also says that this driver includes fixes for FPS drops in Dark Souls 3. According to some forum-goers, despite its numbering, it also does not contain the Vulkan updates from 364.91. This is probably a good thing, because it would be a bit silly to merge developer-branch features into a customer driver that only intends to solve problems before an official driver can be certified. I mean, that's like patching a flat tire, then drilling a hole in one of the good ones to mess around with it, too.

It's not really Pcper, just Ryan and Allyn that pretend to be Nvidia's marketing department. If you watch Josh on the podcasts, he's very impartial about GPUs (and other tech for that matter). I guess that just comes naturally from being knowledgeable.

The other guys tend to be pretty fair as well, but don't usually talk so much about graphics.

I would argue they are slightly biased towards Nvidia but on the whole pretty fair. And certainly not biased against AMD. That said saying they "report the news" is flat out wrong. This site provides editorial content extensively. I appreciate how quantitative the PCPer team is when it comes this editorial content, but it is still a review site primarily. And the distinction between news and editorial content may be minute but IMHO it is important. Also I would consider editorial content more valuable than "simply reporting the news" and in editorial content Bias is a requirement. If they aren't giving me their opinion and backing it up with arguments and (on this site anyway) hard numbers what is the point. I might as well just read company press releases.

PCper is not biased - when Ryan found out gsync was keeping gpu at high MHz at idle he called them out on it. When amd forgot to release drivers for a year they called them out in that. Perhaps we see more nvidia news because they have a greater advertising budget/man power to visit more sites. Both Amd and Nvidia drop the ball here and there. I own both hardware. Damn trolls go back to your caves.

cards were not rebadge, seriously, stop spreading this mis-information. The chips had tweaks and improvements done to them, which qualifies them as a refresh. Remember 4770k, and then the 4790k? It's the same idea, chip got a bump in clock rate and a few tweaks to improve it including more memory, so it is very similar but not exactly the same.
Rebadging would essentially be taking the card out of the box, putting a new label on it and putting it in another box.

Look, we get that you have a strong dislike for AMD products, but mud slinging and false accusations just make you look silly and annoying.

Because AMD thought it was a worthwhile feature to support, while Nvidia likes to remove/not include features that they think are unimportant in order to save power/die space. This time, it came back to bite them. Async compute was not a proprietary AMD feature; Nvidia just took a gamble that didn't pay off.

Hardware companies don't decide what features to use, they can only make the hardware support it. The software is what decides which hardware features are actually used, and AMD doesn't develop games. It was Oxide and the others devs that decided to use async, not AMD.

Actually it has been used pretty much all along. You must have forgotten that Xbone and ps4 are both locked down PC's. Without async compute, those console games would look and perform considerably worse.

Sorry man, but the idea of async compute has never been a "locked only tech". Although Nvidia does support async compute, they just never supported it in any significant way because they lost the bids on supplying chips for the consoles and dx11 was the dominant API at that time.

Go watch the video below and skip to 1:12:20 where they go over all of this.

They should concentrate into publishing drivers that will make their customers stop fearing installing anything newer than 362. Game optimizations can come latter.(I do have a GT 620 - n ot for gaming obviously - and I am staying at 362).

From someone that turned recently to team green, what a can say is this : Nvidia is lacking innovation and respect for it's customers. I bought a 980ti to get the best possible performance in CUDA, and guess what, the drivers are broken, doesn't support Cuda anymore, just NVENC, and my software universe uses only Cuda. DX12 are highly optimized for AC (Async Compute) and guess what, Nvidia can't do it natively.... My old 7970 was indeed better suited for my tasks that this green s**t!!!

Did pcper guys taken a good look at the official nvidia driver forums? Lot, i mean really lot of people reporting dead cards. It is worth to check it out. Before some starting to accuse me with silly things. I got nvidia product since Riva TNT.

Yeah, but it's really hard to see how a driver could brick a card. Even if it screws with power and cooling, there's been dedicated hardware on the card since the Radeon HD 5000 (and Kepler) series to prevent that.

I mean, I guess it could be possible, but I have to expect that both AMD and NVIDIA designed their software such that it wouldn't be.

I've been searching the internet for several weeks now on the whole NVIDIA Maxwell/Pascal not fully supporting DX12/Async Compute mess. And what I've found is a lot of confusing information. Some which is saying that NVIDIA cards are fully supporting DX12's features but accounts from AMD, Oxide and others, stating that NVIDIA's cards don't natively support Async Compute. A recent finding of an upcoming Hitman game still in development also says that NVDIA's cards actually take a performance hit when Async Compute is enabled. PC Perspective, You helped bring to light the frame time issues with AMD cards and the GTX 970 3.5GB fiasco. I IMPLORE YOU GUYS to please write a story on this. Do your best investigative journalism to interview / get statements from all the major players involved and finally clear the air and bring to light what has been eluding the pc enthusiast community (for almost a year now) that you guys have so faithfully advocated for. We need to know if this will be publicly addressed by NVIDIA as they have been all too quiet on this issue. And if the Async Compute issues will persist on the upcoming Pascal consumer parts. Thank You, from a loyal reader and podcast listener.

From all the reading I've been doing on the internet that AMD GCN card benefit so much from async compute because as much as 20% of their shader cores go unused due to inefficiencies in their hardware architecture. Async compute literally fills in the gaps. I've also learned that the upcoming Pascal consumer parts will be utilizing a harware / software feature called Compute Preemption. The following is from "http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/226879-rumor-nvidia-may-have-killed-maxwell-production-ahead-of-june-pascal-launch" : "Compute Preemption is another important new hardware and software feature added to GP100 that allows compute tasks to be preempted at instruction-level granularity, rather than thread block granularity as in prior Maxwell and Kepler GPU architectures. Compute Preemption prevents long-running applications from either monopolizing the system (preventing other applications from running) or timing out." Compute Preemption sound all nice and ideal but I don't believe it's the same as concurrent processing of compute and graphics workloads. It remains to be seen how this will help Pascal's performance numbers and how heavy the usage of Async Compute will be in upcoming DX12 games.

What is Preemption? PreEmption allows tasks with a higher priority (which can be set manually or automatically) to go and be processed first, and less time sensitive tasks will be forced to wait until that work is completed. The graphics cards handle this by use of Context Switching, however in DX11 Context Switching can cause a lot of idle time (due to the API’s serial thinking). That’s where Async Compute/Shading comes to save the day.

As it’s been pointed out by AMD, Async Compute/Shading can counter the latency introduced by Preemption Context Switching by interleaving these tasks across multiple threads to shorten overall render time.

Now as Microprocessor analyst, David Kanter, said, some Oculus employees told him that the best Preemption support for context switches was with AMD by far, Intel was pretty good and NVIDIA was possibly catastrophic

Pascal improves preemption but you still cant run things different things concurrently in the shaders.